I notice that there are a crap load of recipes in this site (which can be a good thing). However as a new brewer it is extremely difficult to find "good" recipes on it. I try to sort by comments and that seems to help.

What prevents a person who does not know crap about making a good beer from creating a recipe and publishing it?

Is there a trick to filtering out the recipes that would taste like crap to even the dumbest of beer drinkers?

I'd post any recipe you find to this or another site where knowlegable brewers hang out (the Brewboard is a good one for recipe criticism) and ask for comments. There're a lot of bad recipes, many of which can be eliminated or corrected pretty quickly by someone that has some basic recipe experience.

Getting and using Designing Great Beer gives you some tools to work with on your own. The book will give you guidelines for successful ingredients and quantities for a given style, so you can look to see if a suspect recipe has a strange ingredient or outrageous quantity.

If you're interested in clones, it's always good to see what the brewer lets you know about the beer on their website and comparing the recipe to what the brewer says they actually use, as well as IBU's and OG's.

Also, many recipes are well tested and sure bets. CJ's (various JPA mutations and the Community Ale's are fantastic) and Denny Cohn's (RyePA and Milo's Alt are classics) recipes are very reliable. Jamil's recipes are great starting places for brewing to style.
Beerdujour.com collects a lot of recipes that have won awards, so someone thought they were good.

I'm happy to share recipes and discuss recipes with anyone -- if there's something that you see in one of the recipes I've posted that you have a question about, let me know (feel free to post in the relevant thread).

Thanks for the post CJ, I didn't want to confuse my already typically overlong post with a lot of links, so I left your name without an appropriate link. How could I possibly choose just one to list? ...and noone has made a single conveinient single page like those other guys have, yet.

I have made, or at least had versions friends have made, of almost all of those you listed, including most every permutation of the JPA, and they are outstanding! One of the great things about CJ's recipes is that they're generally not confined by style guidelines and explore intriguing aspects of recipe design that you won't experience by making another clone.

Thanks for the links guys. I know that I've found a few sites on the Net that have some pretty reliable recipes. It's just that being a fairly new brewer it is difficult to find 'good' recipes on the beertools.com site.

Don't get me wrong I'm glad to have the resource available, I just wish that there were votes or maybe just more comments on the recipes. I know that it's up to the brewer to update the recipe with his/her comments and nobody can force them to do it, but what prevents me from just throwing together a bunch of ingredients and submitting it? I guess what I'm throwing out there is what could they do to make it better for a know-nothing kind of guy like myself?

Thanks again for the recipes, I'll have to check them out. I'm going to be brewing some summer stuff soon and wanted some ideas/suggestions.

Maybe if you could search by rating and the rating system was weighted by and told you how many people had voted. Perhaps a rating could include a "looks like a good recipe" or "I've brewed it" tick box.

The Community Autumn Ale above will actually make a good summer beer, I think. I might brew that again for this summer, if I can fit it in. It's darker than people expect a summer beer to be, but it's real easy drinking.